


sometimes the chemicals work me over

by Aezlo



Series: Rest and Recovery [1]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alien Biology, Canon Autistic Character, Canon Disabled Character, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Light Angst, Medical Procedures, POV Alternating, Post-Season 5, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Withdrawal, but we're focusing on a specific spacebat's recovery so, the best friend squad is there in the background too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:46:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24715534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aezlo/pseuds/Aezlo
Summary: Etheria hums with renewed magic, and peace reigns. Perhaps Etheria can heal and we can rebuild without the constant threat of war.But what of the clone soldiers left untethered by Horde Prime's demise? How do you even begin to rebuild when you've known nothing but war and the dulling caress of the hivemind?
Relationships: Entrapta/Hordak (She-Ra)
Series: Rest and Recovery [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1786942
Comments: 21
Kudos: 241





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from [Simple Creatures - Special](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okueo-8m98s). 
> 
> Welcome to the spacebat rest and recovery clinic. This part of the ride will be a little bumpy, but recovery ain't linear and they've all had a bit of A Time, so.

After Horde Prime’s demise, there is _so much celebrating_. It’s loud, and bright, and completely and absolutely earned and deserved by the Etherians. In his horde, Hordak hadn’t really had much in the way of celebration, primarily because he didn’t really _get_ birthdays or parties. It would be an unseemly indulgence for his kind, and even so, Hordak wasn’t especially interested in the noise and the chaos, the unusual amount of touching and yelling, so he hadn’t really found a reason to pick up the foreign custom.

To that point, at the moment all Hordak wants to do is rest, maybe have a little space to himself to decompress. His skin feels tight, his head is throbbing, and it’s apparent that Horde Prime’s cohabitation has not been kind to his frame. To be fair, he hadn’t been feeling particularly spectacular _before_ that, either. Somehow, he’d forgotten how exhausting stiffly hiding his affliction was without a suit to allow him minute periods of rest.

Entrapta stays with him, hair almost constantly petting or touching him, which he finds he doesn’t mind for some reason. He is so pleased to see her, to listen to her adventures in the past year or so that he can’t help smiling and letting himself get dragged along. Entrapta was alive, and had been looking for him as much as he would have done for her were their situations reversed. There’s something fizzy and fuzzy underneath the pain at the forefront of his mind, and he brandishes it like a shield for as long as he can.

“Entrapta,” he rasps into a small pause in Entrapta’s description of the improvements she’s made to Darla, as well as her ideas for future modifications and their ramifications on flight velocity and passenger comfort.

“Yes?” she turns her entire body towards him, pivoting on her hair from where she’s been ambling next to him. He hadn’t noticed it until now, but their shuffling around the hilltop all afternoon has begun to mark the ground. How long have they been up here? He has no sense of time at all. It feels like a strange, thick haze blankets him and his memories of the past… hours?

“I need to rest,” he offers softly, unconsciously tilting his body closer to hers to hide their conversation.

“Oh! Oh, of course, let’s go find a tent for you and—” she begins dragging him off, stumbling just a little down the hill towards the bank of quickly thrown up tents for the clones. The Etherians are perhaps overestimating the amount of rest that a normal horde clone needs, he muses.

They’re meant to sleep one-to-three hours every thirty-four hours generally, though Hordak often needed more. It was likely due to the fact that he was… well, defective. And, perhaps, that Etheria’s limitations did not give him the things that he needed to maintain himself without sleep.

His meandering thoughts are jarred as he missteps on uneven ground and nearly falls to his knees. Entrapta exclaims and rushes to set him on his feet again with tendrils of her hair, and he snarls without meaning to. His mind races, _people will see_ , and all the breath leaves his lungs. He’s been so careful, so exacting in the act, and here he would be exposed for the transgression of his own pain. He finds himself blankly staring at Entrapta’s rapidly moving mouth, taking in her increasingly agitated expression. He realizes belatedly that she has been talking nearly the entire way down from the hilltop and into the camp and he has not understood a single word. He squints, trying to, really _pushing_ himself to focus and parse the words she is saying but the dull throbbing encasing his head sharpens to a white pain which blots out even his sight.

“Hordak!”

Somehow, he understands that before everything goes dark.

* * *

He wakes alone, which is a minor blessing, because he sucks in air like a drowning man, and then hacks and splutters on it. They’re in the Whispering Woods, or… something like it, the strange magical pollen in the air bears a similarity to it. It has always tickled and irritated his lungs to the point that he’d attempted reworking his sole functioning scrubber to filter for it. He’d just managed to damage it further, though, leaving his lungs defenseless against the Etherian air.

He absent-mindedly reaches for the place where the awareness of the hivemind would be, to pick up his coordinates, the time, a quick debrief as to why he is in such bad shape and is rewarded by a pain so all-encompassing that he nearly blacks out again.

He shivers and shudders, breathing harshly of the irritating air and slowly, ever so slowly, awareness of the situation trickles back to him. He is Hordak, a defective clone, currently on a backwater—on Etheria, in a flimsy poly-canvas tent with a cool breeze playing the flaps open on either side. He is in an incredible amount of pain, at least partially due to the insubstantial bedroll laid out on the hard ground, one of his horde’s own now that he looks at it.

His body instinctually has curled into a fetal position at some point, a hand wrapping around the base of his neck, covering up his cerebral port. He knows from experience that staying curled up like this will make him incredibly stiff, limiting his movement and draining his already reduced energy reserves. Still, it’s difficult to force himself to unfurl. He’s chilled from the layer of sweat on his skin, and woozy from the ache in his back, shoulders, hips, and… his left wrist and arm feel sharply injured, a disconcertingly dull pain that has caused him to unconsciously cradle the arm to his chest.

He slowly and jerkily works himself not upright, but onto his side, no longer curled up in a ball. He examines his wrist, frustratedly narrowing and squinting his eyes to force his fuzzy mind to focus. The radial part of his forearm is swollen, and his entire arm shakes uncontrollably as he holds it out to examine it. Memories of thrusting Prime over the ledge come to him, the tension and twang of the muscles in his shoulders and wrist that he’d felt distantly at the time thanks to Prime’s influence. And then Prime had forcibly taken over his body and yanked Entrapta around by her very long and very heavy hair without a care for _anyone_ involved.

He could still feel the wretched burn of Prime’s disgust and anger at him in his own head, a loathing that seemed to go down to his deepest core. If Prime had stayed with him for very much longer, he might well have burned Hordak out of his own mind and body with that hate. He’d _known_ that Prime felt that way about him, about any blemish on his beautiful, pristine empire, but it still makes him curl up unconsciously again.

He feels shivery, weak, and frail in that moment, and his mind is too muzzy to figure out the proper solutions. In his attempt to mull, a sudden dark clarity comes to him, and he remembers the aftermath of his crash on Etheria. He’d had a fair idea about the illness’ origination, but hadn’t confirmed it until he’d glowered down at a sweaty, twitchy force captain, forced to give up some substance or another and he’d recognized the symptoms. His body had been broken by the crash, but the true pain hadn’t started until a day or two later when the withdrawal hit. He’d endured cold sweats and continuously, compulsively reached for the hivemind, desperate for the comfort and dulling of his only home. All he came back with was the horror of a barren void.

Apparently having Horde Prime forcibly dragged from his body had turned the myriad corridors of his mind that lead to home, to _Prime_ , into a new, lancingly painful spiderweb, a trap to be sprung and stumbled upon at any moment his mind drifted too close.

He heaves a belabored breath, wishing his lungs could be satisfied with the thick air here. It will be fine, Hordak is very familiar with managing pain. With some difficulty, he pushes himself into an upright sitting position, and takes in his surroundings.

He snorts in disgust at what he sees; he hates open-air tents, honestly. The illusion of safety and secrecy is almost worse than just sleeping exposed to the elements. If he has to be on the frontlines, he usually holds one transport for himself to rest in, though he rarely sleeps when he’s on the field. If someone were to stumble in on him and discover his frailty beneath the armor, it would be the end of him, of everything he’s worked so hard to achieve. He glances down at his frame, smothered and hidden away by Prime’s uniform, and can’t help the snarled hiss. It’s just cloth, elastic and polymer, but he wishes to be free of it sooner rather than later. He has never enjoyed the sensation of the cloth on the sensitive holes in his arms. Still, it’s protecting him now, hiding his injuries and illness from view.

 _Brother is kind_ , he thinks dully, and it takes him a solid beat before he jerks in a retracted dry-heave, waves of loathing shuddering through him.

He needs these clothes off, _now_. He needs to go somewhere secluded, and defensible, and start assembling braces and struts for himself. If Prime hadn’t _removed_ his unauthorized augments from his wrists and elbows, his arms wouldn’t be in such bad shape. Now, he needs to shore up the injuries and recreate his augments, but this time with lowered dexterity. It will be a challenge when he is already so beaten down by this body, but that isn’t a particularly new phenom for him. _All must suffer—_ no, don’t think about that.

He’s done this before. He will do it again.


	2. Chapter 2

A lock of lavender hair absent-mindedly pets over Hordak’s forehead. Entrapta had gotten too excited, too ecstatic to have Hordak back and in reach, and Hordak had never been good at stating his limits, or taking care of himself. He’d managed to collapse mere feet from the tent they’d set aside for him. Micah, or perhaps Glimmer, or, well, _someone_ had decided to at the very least take care of the immediate need of the clones and set up a bank of tents and beds for the lot of them. There were about one hundred clones left here near the spire where Prime had been attempting to drill into Etheria’s heart, and many, many more across Etheria at large.

In spite of apparently being bred and conditioned for war, the clones left behind seem very docile in temperament, at least at the moment. Perhaps that was more indicative of the trauma they’d all so recently suffered? Most are wandering around looking quite lost, and a few have broken down into hysterics, hiding behind tree trunks and tables. They all seem to be showing the same reluctance as Hordak at being seen in a state of weakness. A part of her mind races with the potential data she could be gathering in this situation, learning about alien clones and their connection to a hivemind. What would the consequences of the forced dissolution of those connections be? Would there be more serious side-effects? Were some of Hordak’s defects the result of prolonged distance from Prime’s influence? It would be cruel, but not entirely unexpected, for Prime to engineer in some strong deterrents to defecting, wouldn’t it?

She hums to herself, eyes roving Hordak’s form where she’s tucked him into his bedroll. He had seemed fairly healthy at first glance, but with his form slumped by unconsciousness, she can make out a faint sheen of sweat on his brow, the awkward drape of his ill-fitted uniform on his thinner form. With a loud huff and mild thumping of her hair around her, she berates herself for not noticing or thinking about his wellbeing, too wrapped up in having him here with her again. He would, of course, have some amount of experience hiding his afflictions in this very same outfit and armor, and she had bought that without even _thinking._

“Entrapta?” Bow’s voice rings out over the tents. She’d briefly seen him hanging around with Glimmer, Adora, and Catra earlier but hadn’t seen him since. He sounds faintly panicked. She gives Hordak a quick pat on the head, and pokes her head out to see where he is.

“Hi Bow!” Entrapta pops up behind him after roving her way to him through several tents on her hair.

“Ah!” he jerks in surprise, whirling around, “Hi! Hi, hello, uh, can I, can I talk to you?” He appears to be nervous; his hands keep twirling and tangling with one another in front of his bared abdomen.

“We are talking!” Entrapta grins, and begins tugging Bow towards Hordak’s tent, unwilling to leave him alone for too long.

“Ah, uh, no, Entrapta, where are we—” she flips the tent flap open, and thankfully Hordak is still lying there, breathing softly. He seems to breathe more when he’s asleep, she’s noticed. Perhaps something in his old armor had allowed him to retain or process his oxygen for longer? At times in the sanctum he had gone whole very disconcerting minutes without inhaling or exhaling.

“Oh, ah, Hordak, right?” Bow gives her an uncertain smile, and she peers at him, trying to read the question, understand what exactly he’s asking. Of course it’s Hordak, who else would it be?

“Yes,” she answers flatly after a moment, peering into his face.

“Uh, look, uh, we need you in the uh, Princess tent? There’s uh,” he leans in, eyes darting around, “there’s something going on with Prime’s ship.” He’s trying to be quiet, but his voice crack ruins his subtlety.

Entrapta blinks blankly at his face for too long, and then looks up at the new extraterrestrial tree that’s floating in the sky.

“How does a tree survive in the vacuum of space, anyway?” she asks, and pulls out her recorder to begin enumerating her thoughts on whether or not magicking the Velvet Glove into a tree would truly disable Prime’s ship. At some point, Bow must have started dragging her towards the Princess Planning Tent, because she finds herself now being stared at by five pairs of expectant eyes.

“Ah,” she swallows, her legs swinging a little as she nervously adjusts herself on her hair, subtly flipping her mask over her face. “Hello!”

“What’s going on?” she asks, peering around the room and trying not to recoil from everyone’s stares.

“Uh, right,” Adora shakes herself, and begins pointing at a large data pad on the table. “There’s strong energy readings coming from all over Prime’s ship. They started about an hour ago.” The image of prime’s needle-like ship has slowly growing, glowing circles of light coming from locations that Entrapta had identified as the power hubs from the maps she’d downloaded of the ship earlier. She hadn’t had time to really figure out _what_ he was using to power his ship, but she knew it wasn’t the thulite crystals like the First Ones’ ship. It had appeared to be some sort of reaction between two substances rendered into fluid through some further chemical reactions, and honestly, she just hadn’t had enough time to study it.

“It’s too close to Etheria, we’re worried it might… explode,” Bow rubs the back of his neck, as Entrapta reviews the documentation, poking and prodding at Bow’s diagrams.

“It will!” Entrapta grins. “It will likely destroy all of our known system, if not much of the known universe based on the energy readings!” she types in some figures and runs some new simulations, showing the explosive results to her audience.

She’s still looking at the diagram, adjusting and tweaking the numbers for accuracy’s sake, but even so, she feels the mood in the tent dour immediately.

“Can we stop it? We’ve gotta get up there and do something!” Glimmer gestures sharply, leaving trails of sparkles behind.

“We can take Darla! I might be able to contain the blast if I can figure out what he’s using to power his ship, or we can move the ship somewhere else before it explodes, although I’m not sure how much functionality is left now that it’s overrun by—”

“Alright,” Adora interrupts, dropping her fist into her other palm. “Entrapta, Bow and I will board what’s left of the Velvet Glove and take stock of the situation.” Glimmer frowns and it appears an argument is imminent, but Entrapta has an idea.

“Oh, just a sec!” Entrapta turns and powers out of the tent, much to the bewilderment of those left behind. She returns a minute or so later with two clones in tow. “I asked around for any clone that knew how the engines work! They’ll help us!”

Adora and Glimmer look… unhappy with one another, but once Bow touches both of their shoulders and gives a weak smile, they seem to relax. “We’ll call if we need you up there, Glimmer, but for now it’s better to have your magic down here to protect everyone, just in case something _does_ happen,” Bow says quietly. Glimmer’s face contorts through several expressions too fast for Entrapta to understand, before she huffs and turns away.

“Fine!” Glimmer grumbles, and in spite of her outburst, Adora and Bow seem tickled by the interaction. 

* * *

The two clones had apparently once worked and repaired the machinery in Prime’s ships, and while alarmed at the current state of their old home, they had been able to deescalate the meltdown within a few hours. They kept devolving into hacking spasms throughout the process until Entrapta quickly reworked two helmets with air filtration systems which seemed to help mildly.

“Pollen,” one of the clones offered, gesturing at the soft globes of yellow magic floating throughout the ship. Entrapta had been assuming that the chemicals used in powering the engine had been the issue, but apparently not. Were the clones allergic to magic?

“Is the ship capable of being moved now, you think?” Bow asks, seemingly in the general direction of Entrapta and the two clones. The clones keep holding hands, touching almost unconsciously as they work as if to ensure that the other was still where they expected them to be. They share a look that seems to show confusion, which Entrapta could relate to. They’ve just finished turning everything _off._ The ship would not be moving anywhere anytime soon.

“I think too many of the internal workings were damaged when She-Ra transmogrified the ship, not to mention the fact that we just deactivated all of the ship’s internal energy reserves,” Entrapta rubs her chin with a hair tuft. “Is there any chance that this will happen again now that we’ve powered down the backup systems?” she turns to the clones, scanning their near-identical faces.

The two clones consider the slightly melty and root-covered remains of the third engine-room they’ve powered down. “Don’t… know?” the one that hadn’t spoken before now offers, his face tilted away and obscured by his helmet.

“Ah,” She-Ra sounds puzzled. “Well, we’ve taken care of the immediate threat. Let’s get back to camp,” she claps Bow roughly around the shoulders, and shakes him with some sort of grin on her face. Entrapta finds herself glad that she hadn’t tried to grab her like that, and unintentionally takes another step back, closer to the clones.

For some reason she can’t define, it makes her long for Hordak beside her, whole and capable in his armor. It’s a disturbingly familiar feeling to her lately. She’s been longing for his presence near constantly, even with the latent fears of his abandoning her on Beast Island, something deep in her psyche has longed for his presence near constantly. There’d been points in her exile where she’d hallucinated a large, imposing figure looming over her shoulder. He’d always managed to steer her right, pointing out the pieces that she’d turned into her ambulatory bot, Janet, or identifying Micah’s camp with a flippant smirk, practically goading her into stealing his rations. She may have hallucinated his amused voice rumbling, “Well, if he didn’t want them stolen, then he shouldn’t have left them out, hm?”

She’s missed him. It’s not a grand realization, but it still surprises her.


	3. Chapter 3

Returning to a non-pressurized environment seems to make her head twinge every time, perhaps an anxiety reaction to feeling her hair's weight flex with real versus simulated gravity. Something to study at another time.

She isn’t sure how she's missed it, but there’s the beginning of a roaring in her ears, the fear of being swallowed up by her own sensory input. No more today, she decides, unless there’s another potential nuclear meltdown. Entrapta’s just going to shut herself in Hordak's tent and ignore everything else. She’s getting a little bit of tunnel-vision, too close to a shivery sensory meltdown to deal with the particulars of her surroundings, so it’s not a surprise that she misses someone calling and reaching for her.

Someone catches her shoulder, touching the skin there and she’s slingshotted back by how fast she'd been barreling forward. She slams her mask over her face and turns to figure out _who_ is touching her and why.

“Princess Entrapta?" It’s one of the security detail left over from Brightmoon, collaring a sweating clone with Wrong Hordak worriedly petting and attempting to soothe him. "There's something wrong with the clones." The woman with a scar over her nose frowns and readjusts her grip as the clone attempts to get away from her again.

Entrapta makes a wet, frustrated noise. She can’t deal with this right now! She needs to go sit somewhere quiet and dark and _stop_ _processing_ for a second. Hordak will understand! No one else ever has.

"I-I can't," she manages, her fogged eyes turning away from the intimidating general and searching the clone's face because for whatever reason the pupilless eyes of the clones make her less antsy. She pauses, taking in the sallow skin and general distress of the collared clone. His eyes are a glowless grey-yellow.

"Oh no," she mutters to herself. She'd missed most of Wrong Hordak's withdrawal, mostly caught the tail end when they were using his neural network on Krytis, but it’s the same look, just earlier in the process.

She'd wanted to study it, if she had the chance, attempt to figure out if it was hormonal, or psychosomatic and just relating to a disconnection from the hivemind. But Hordak would be suffering from it too, perhaps even worse because this would be his second time around.

She makes all of these connections blisteringly fast, turning away from the captain of the guard, her hair puffed in alarm as she scrambles off with nary a word.

* * *

When she arrives at the tent there is a distinct lack of Hordak. She exhales wetly a few times, trying to build herself up to a point that she can go back out there. She finds herself missing Roperto, a large and rotund bot, sort of like Emily though he’d been one of her pre-horde bots. She could crawl into him when it was bad like this and his slow sauntering around was a soothing rocking sensation, a way to compartmentalize while getting wherever she needed to go. People ignore robots mostly, so she could use him to move about without being disturbed, too; useful whenever she was having a particularly non-verbal day and couldn’t just take the vents. She hasn't needed his assistance since she was a teenager, and she suddenly misses him fiercely.

Emily bwoops worriedly from the tent flap, and seems to tilt her body repetitively in a direction, as if asking Entrapta to follow.

"Just a sec, Emily," Entrapta calls, snuffling and wiping her face under the mask. She'll find Hordak again. Just take a few calming breaths and get back to it.

"What is it?" she asks the worriedly wriggling bot. She gives Emily her full attention, which makes the bot boop and wiggle for a second in pleasure before trundling off towards another section of camp.

Entrapta is so focused on trailing Emily that she doesn’t really notice where they are, or the loose perimeter of guards and spells that she breaches easily. There are a few medical tents here, recognizable by the symbols on the fabric, and... a number of nauseous-looking clones weakly attempting to leave. Inside the tent that Emily leads her to there are three clones, two in positions of quasi-rest, draped awkwardly over cots or half-curled against crates. Someone appears to have taken the time to remove their arm-cannons, too, which is probably a good idea. She wants to study them desperately. Hopefully the clones hadn’t struggled too much during the removal, and one might still be intact somewhere.

The third clone is sitting stiff and slightly hunched, staring determinedly at his hands which are clasped tightly in his lap and tremoring pretty consistently in spite of his obvious attempts to subdue the motion. He has the look of someone pulled from the underbrush, his white uniform stuck with burrs and bits of leaf and mud, but many of the clones are looking like that at the moment. His eyes are the same sickly yellow-grey as the other clones, and she’s not really sure how she knows its him, but she knows.

Entrapta doesn’t really think, doesn’t really have the capacity at that moment, she just takes two quick strides on her hair and plunks herself in Hordak’s lap and clings. Hordak make a soft disgruntled noise which is wonderfully familiar, and coughs a little. After a second, he huffs familiarly and one of the hands she’d displaced rests on the crook of her hair which has curled around them both. She whimpers and curls deeper into his chest, her own body shivering to match Hordak’s. She might find that poetic if she thought about it.

As it is, she’s only able to listen to Hordak’s labored breathing and remain dimly aware of him softly speaking with another clone hovering over her shoulder.

* * *

“Wait, what’s wrong with her, brother?” a clone that Hordak has seen hanging around the other princesses shifts around, trying to get a good look at the small Etherian curled into his lap. Hordak’s unable to mask the low, subsonic growl or the disdainful curl of his lip, but his arms are doing poorly enough that he manages not to clutch her to his chest possessively. It’s something instinctual that he doesn’t really think about.

“She is,” he takes a deep breath in, “overwhelmed.” He pauses to heave another breath. “As are… we all.”

The clone actually blinks at him, which is surprising. Healthy clones are generally less likely to blink, or blink far less often than most sapient humanoid species he’s run into.

“She needs to rest!” the clone yells, pointing up triumphantly as if this were a grand conclusion to come to. He’s much too loud about it all and Hordak sighs as his ears curl down and away. This attracts the loud clone’s attention, and he quirks his head overdramatically, “Oh. How’d you—”

“Wrong Hordak, we need your help with another clone!” a green-haired Etherian calls, pulling aside the tent flap, and Hordak pauses, wondering why exactly they were coming to _him_ about this? Why would he be helping with the clones? Or wait, how had they even recognized him? Were his eyes and mouth returning to their defective states already?

The clone bothering him appears to have left while he was silently pondering. Perhaps the Etherians were simply calling all the clones Hordaks? That would be horrifically confusing for everyone involved, not to mention offensive to him personally. He grumbles darkly to himself.

The bundle in his lap shifts at his grumble, and he feels more than sees her removing her mask and hiding her face in his chest, turning so that both her arms and legs hug his torso. He thinks it should feel claustrophobic, or silly even, but there’s a strange fond warmth in his chest. He deeply wants to raise his arms around her, but he knows she’s sensitive, like him. He hadn’t even thought about it before now, but he himself is usually very bothered whenever anyone gets close enough to touch, but Entrapta has been touching him all afternoon.

He clears his throat softly, recognizing that his grumble has upset her. “It’s…” he exhales deeply, “alright.” It’s not really, but it’s a minor lie. He does not need anything in the moment and does not need her to move. She makes a tight noise and wriggles against him, reminiscent of Emily asking for a pat. He frowns as he considers the form wrapped around his torso.

“Would you like—” he starts, but her hair interrupts him and gently takes his wrists and places his hands flat against her back.

He delicately cradles her in his arms, careful of his own aching limbs and doing his best to ensure he leaves her exposed flesh untouched. A reciprocated hug. His first. He rests his tired head on hers, and sighs deeply, feeling some of the residual tension drain from him.


	4. Chapter 4

Entrapta wakes with a sharp snort and jerk, startled by the unfamiliar environment. She’s not on her plush couch in Dryl, nor the daybed she’s concocted in the rebellion camp, pillows and bedrolls piled up against a corner. Someone else is in the room with her, as well, someone very close by based on the sound of their panting. She’s been forced to get used to sleeping in a room with other people with the rebellion camp, but… this is different somehow.

She takes in her surroundings slowly and finds that she’s completely wrapped herself around someone’s leg… Hordak’s leg, by the look of it. It’s a bit less muscular than the last she’d seen it but it is attached to Hordak, so, definitely his leg. She looks up, and finds the clone looking worse for wear since the last she’d seen of him. He’s panting and sweating profusely, his platinum hair lank and out of place. He’s pushed himself away from her while she slept, lodging his back and body up against a crate.

“Hordak?” Entrapta sits up and rubs her eyes, her hair finding her mask and affixing it to her head. His eyes open at hearing his name and he makes a desperate, unhappy sound, like he’s once again uncomfortable just _having_ a name. He uses his newly freed limb to push back further and curl against the crate. It’s hard to read where he’s looking, but his line of vision seems hazy, swaying around somewhat drunkenly as his head tilts around.

“Who are you?” he rasps. “Why do I know you—” he breaks off, biting back something as his body wracks through a strong shudder. “Wh-what happened to, why—” he grunts in pain, his jaw clenching and his eyes slamming shut as something rolls through him.

Entrapta brings her mask over her face without really thinking about it. “I’m Entrapta. We’re… we were lab partners,” her voice is flat and muffled. Hordak audibly swallows, his ears rotating. “You’re free,” she offers softly, and Hordak makes a tight noise in response. He locks his hands over the port in his neck and shivers.

This is to be expected, she tells herself. Recovery will take time, and Hordak has so little experience with letting people help him. She huffs to herself, and rubs her face under the mask as her hair pulls out her data pad. She’s never been great at the sociological or biological sciences, but there are a great many scientists on Etheria. Maybe someone else has made some breakthroughs and found a way to soften the withdrawal process? No need to invent the wheel if someone else already has a schematic for it.

It’s clear that Hordak wants to be by himself too, and currently she isn’t in a position to push the issue. The other clones in the tent are similarly curled or wedged into corners. None of the ones present are showing the touching behavior she’d seen of the two clones who’d helped with Prime’s engines. She isn’t sure what that means, but she makes note of it nonetheless.

“I’ll be back, Hordak,” she says quietly, pointed away from him. He makes a soft noise in response, his breathing still rough.

Entrapta wanders outside of the tent, the blush of the moonrise on the horizon making the world seem even more magical and pastel than it well, just _is_ , now. Would She-Ra’s rejuvenation of the world mean that these changes were permanent? Are all of Etheria’s climates going to be like this, lush and verdant? The lack of diversity could be problematic in the long run.

She shakes herself. _Focus Entrapta._

Emily boops near her left hip, waking from her sleep cycles at Entrapta’s presence. She pats the bot absent-mindedly as she considers the magical barrier around the medical camp that they appear to have quarantined the sick clones in. Do they think it’s catching? She walks up to it and finds it unresponsive to her, she’s fully capable of walking back and forth through it. Interesting. Have they figured out a way to isolate the clones genetic or magic signatures?

Not many people, or clones, appear to be up and ambulatory yet. The party yesterday had likely gone on deep into the night, meaning that everyone would be hungover and cranky today. She could relate for once, a faint papery quality to her skin from her sensory meltdown was still present just under the current turmoil of Hordak’s withdrawal and rejection.

Right! She was going to research and see if anyone else was making strides there. She pokes at her data pad, and pulls herself up to sit on Emily as the bot begins to work through a basic sentinel routine of the clone quarantine area. Entrapta trolls through the various forums and data sharing sites available to see what updates and research have been accomplished in her absence of the past few days. There’s a sea elf biologist named Lash who, she vaguely remembers, used to study the effects of the deep ocean on the various races of Etheria, with a focus on Prince Peekablue’s underwater hideouts. Lash appears to have taken the clones withdrawal process on as a personal project, releasing long reports of symptoms, potential causes and cures. 

The biggest problem facing Lash and their cohorts currently tackling this problem is that the clones appear to be very, _very_ resistant to eating or drinking in ways that would be normal for Etherians. There’s a lot of talk about maintaining purity of their bodies, and anguish once they collapse and are forced to ingest anything. Lash and the others aren’t even sure if water is good for them, or what nutrients they would need, or—

Oh, she really wishes Hordak was here. Or, well, here and available with his faculties intact. Not that he isn’t! Or wouldn’t be… But! The point! The point is that he’d lived on Etheria for decades! He’d know more about this sort of thing than _anyone!_

“Ah! Are you feeling better?” Wrong Hordak steps into view, and Emily nearly swipes him with one of her legs, stumbling back and forth for a second as she recalibrates her routing.

“Oh! Wrong Hordak!” she jumps. “Perfect!” Wrong Hordak does not seem to have the engineering mind of Hordak, but he’d likely be able to help her answer a few simple questions about his biology that she could use to get Hordak back up and running. She uses her hair to maneuver off of Emily’s dome and loom over him, causing the usually bubbly clone to freeze.

“Is—are you still feeling unwell, brother?” Wrong Hordak swallows. “Do you need me to hold you like—”

“Nope!” Entrapta jerks herself back on her hair, and rocks back and forth, practically using her whole body to communicate a “no” shake. “Call me Entrapta, please!”

Wrong Hordak’s eyes seem to dart around, but he nods hesitantly after a moment.

“You said that you consume amniotic fluid when we were in space!” she points and Wrong Hordak blinks incomprehensibly up at her.

“Tell me how! You and Hordak don’t eat like we Etherians do, and you’re not photosynthetic, you do appear to have a digestive system just like us so—” she huffs at herself for getting distracted again. “How? How do you ingest anything?”

She’s been circling the clone in a somewhat threatening manner, and he seems a little unnerved by this whole interaction, shrinking into himself.

“Uhm. We have ventral ports for… such things,” he swallows. “We do not sully the vessel of prime with food or…” he pauses and blinks pointedly for a moment. “Oh, brother has lied to us!” he yowls, one of his hands curling into a righteous fist.

Wrong Hordak storms off in the direction of what is likely the canteen, a faint white smoke hovering over that part of camp.

Okay, so, ventral ports. That means there has to be some sort of system like an IV bag, or something else vacuum sealed, or perhaps something else even more technologically advanced? She’d nabbed one of Wrong Hordak’s empty vials of amniotic fluid from a trash receptacle on Darla, and between that and her new knowledge, she pulls together a bag with a long cable using the needle and socket connection she’d seen on Hordak’s armor apparatus.

She bounds back into the medical camp as the moons begin to reach their apex, signaling midday. She hasn’t eaten or paused since talking to Wrong Hordak, still compulsively checking Lash’s feed of information on the clones they were handling around Salineas and elsewhere. The clones seem to be receptive to saline solutions, and after she’d informed them of the ventral ports and the proper connections, other camps were having some minor success hydrating and feeding the clones. There wasn’t a real consensus on what they should be feeding them, or how liquid or porous their food could be through the ports, but progress was being made.

Hordak would likely have a more definitive answer, she just had to get him some hydration and nutrition. He’d gotten grumpy and fussy before when he hadn’t gotten enough rest, and she feels quite silly that she hadn’t considered that he’d have these same needs of hers as well. How cybernetic are the clones, really? She’s apparently made some grave errors in assuming they were more robotic than they truly were.

Emily bwoops her greeting at her as she reaches Hordak’s tent. The bot has apparently decided her best purpose at the moment is to stay near Hordak, plunked outside of his tent, and if that isn’t the sweetest thing. “Hi Emily, thanks!” Entrapta pats her chassis and enters the tent, smashing headfirst into a bent-over humanoid dripping fluid into an unconscious clone’s mouth.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that! Here!” She thrusts a saline bag with a cable at the man, and looks around the otherwise empty tent with growing trepidation.

“What?” the man looks at the bag incredulously. “What am I supposed to do with this?” He peers at the socket and needle connection while Entrapta begins pacing out the tent to find Hordak.

“You plug it into the ports on their abdomen!” she calls, and heaves a sigh of relief as she finds Hordak curled into a ball behind a crate that’s been cracked open to reveal a slew of medical packs. One has been left open on the cot she and Hordak woke up on, likely dug through for the pipettes that the man had been using on the clone earlier.

“Hi Hordak!” she grins and the once-warlord of Evil Horde looks up at her bleakly with yellow eyes. “I have some saline solution for you, okay?”

His eyes tick down to the bag in her hands, and he swallows thickly. His eyes slowly trace the cable and a small smile graces his lips.

“Entrapta,” he smirks, a tired warmth in it that makes Entrapta squeak a bit in happiness. She’d expected that she _might_ have to manhandle Hordak a bit, hopefully get his consent to take off the hooded robe and somehow expose his ports, but as he slowly, stiffly uncurls from his position she can see that he’s just in the dark gray bodysuit now. He holds a hand out shakily for the bag, his fingers oddly curled, as if he doesn’t have full control over them. She tucks the bag and cabling carefully into his hand.

“Ah,” he rasps. “It does not… require this,” he tries to use his other hand to point but appears to be having some difficulties. “The… the needle,” he clarifies, and seems to be trying to articulate the hows and whys of that, but she stops him with a hair-hand gesture.

“Do you need help getting to the ports? Can I help? Your dexterity seems to be reduced at the moment,” she considers, and Hordak makes a soft crackling noise in the back of his throat. It appears to be laughter, based on his expression.

“I missed you,” he states softly as he exhales, and begins pawing at his left side. Much to her surprise the garment separates easily, as if there were velcro or loose snaps holding the sections around his abdomen together.

“Wowwww,” she wiggles a little in place, and nearly bumps into the man who’d been tending the other clone who is now looming over the two of them. “What kind of material is that? How’s it do that? Is it some sort of reactive mesh that only pulls apart a certain way so that it’s resistant to cutting and—”

“Excuse me,” the man touches her shoulder, attempting to get her attention and she turns to look up at him with a still-exuberant look on her face. “Do you have more of these? We have twenty clones in quarantine right now, and some might be dying from dehydration. From what we can tell.”

Beside her she hears a soft _clik_ followed by a relieved sigh as Hordak connects the bag to the upper port on his left side.

“Of course! I made five of them as I was prototyping, but I can make more! I can show you how to make them, actually, it’s not all that hard, you just take a—oh wait! Hordak, you know what’s poisonous or unhealthy for you to eat on Etheria right?”

Hordak blinks up at her tiredly. He seems to be slowly perking up with the added fluids. “Yes,” he replies after a moment, his face and tone unreadable as his eyes appear to flick between the two of them.

“Okay! I’m going to show this medic how to make these bags and then we’ll talk about that, okay?”

Hordak makes a low _hrmm_ noise in his throat, an apparent agreement, as he leans back and closes his eyes. He flinches a little at something after a second and picks up the bag to peer at it. “Be careful of bubbles,” he grumbles, and begins clumsily kneading the bag.

* * *

Using the unconscious clone, and what she’d just seen Hordak do, she’s able to figure out an even easier solution to the cabling and connecting. The little capsule of amniotic fluid from Wrong Hordak hadn’t had any cabling, just an end that popped off with a film that had been broken, likely in the process of connecting to the port. Seeing the ports up close on the unconscious clone confirmed that there was no location for the needle to connect to, so it must function on pressure or suction from opening a vacuum sealed environment into a stabilized environment. She truncates the cabling and between her and Francis, the human medic helping with the clone, they’re able to figure out a way to quickly put together saline bags for the sick clones.

She’s rapidly tapping her new findings into her data pad, informing Lash and the others of the simpler solution when the corner Hordak’s in makes a soft frustrated noise, one of his legs shooting out as if he’d just attempted to push himself up and lost traction.

“Hi! Do you need help?” Entrapta walks over to him, and Hordak smiles weakly up at her.

“Do… do you have another of those?” he asks softly. He seems much more breathless than the other clones. Her hair fusses behind her for one of the prototypes she’d brought with her, snipping off the needle and handing it to him. “Thank you,” he breathes, and focuses on unclamping the empty bag and attaching the new one, rather than undoing the already attached cabling. His fingers are clumsy and shaky, and he appears to be rushing a little under her watchful gaze.

“Why not just detach that one and reattach the next?” she asks, leaning over him a little.

“Uhm,” Hordak releases the clamp a little, relaxing as the fluid begins transferring. “I… made a similar device. It is… uncomfortable to detach, air gets caught up in the socket easily,” he gestures vaguely.

“Oh! How do you fix that?” she considers Hordak’s discarded medical tubing that she’d nabbed in her hair.

“I…” he starts, and then looks a bit dejected as he sighs tiredly, apparently having trouble finding the words, or the energy to dive into something potentially complex.

“Oh wait, what about food? You were going to tell me all about your diet here on Etheria!” she exclaims, and Hordak laughs dryly.

“It…” he gently kneads the bag again, avoiding her eyes. “Do you have access to our old files?” he asks softly, an odd layer of dejection in his voice.

“Oh! Yes! Did you keep record of it on the horde data drives?” she jiggles a little in her hair excitedly.

“Hidden, but yes,” he holds out a quivering hand for her data pad, and she quickly pulls up her backups of the horde’s datafiles and hands it over. She watches as he slowly considers the pad, flipping through screens, back and forth a few times like he’s trying to remember where he’d kept it. After a few minutes and rumbling quietly to himself in thought, he hands back the data pad with a simple, text-dense program on the screen. It appears to be translating in front of her eyes, from the strange language of Hordak’s more personal databases into Etherian.

“Those are poisonous, or detrimental,” he offers, and indeed, he seems to have pulled up a screen listing a number of plants and animals with marked negative physiological responses next to them. He points vaguely towards the side of the program, “everything else is catalogued by apparent nutritional value.”

“Wow!” Entrapta jitters in place a little, wanting to twirl around but they are in very tight quarters. “This is amazing Hordak!”

Hordak smiles at her, his face still creased and tired. “I’ll go get you some food and—oh! I haven’t eaten all day either! I’ll get us both some food and be right back! Emily’s just outside the tent, so if you need anything just holler for her! Bye!”

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments are appreciated, even if I don't get back to you, I read them! Come yell at me on [tumblr](https://daezdlo.tumblr.com/), if you like.


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